Smart strategy can save open-plan offices up to 25 percent of energy on lighting

In order to find out the best lighting strategy for

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employee comfort, De Bakker set up two darkened research areas of different sizes as an office. She then asked the subjects, 95 in total, to set the lighting in a way that felt comfortable. Using these results, she then tested the lighting set-up that had been most frequently chosen in a real open office, and asked the employees there, 20 in total, to evaluate the lighting conditions. De Bakker: "The test subjects were not able to switch off the light completely in these experiments because earlier research showed that this caused unpleasantly large light contrasts in the area. So employees could only dim the light."De Bakker discovered that an office with three light levels is the best strategy. If an office worker is working alone in a medium-sized open-plan office, the desk at which the user is working should be fully lit. The lamps above the three surrounding desks may be slightly dimmed (35-65 cd/m2), and the lighting in the rest of the room may be dimmed even more (20-50 cd/m2). De Bakker calculated that this would enable you to save more than 25 percent of the energy consumption for lighting in a medium-sized office. The size of the space appeared to be important for perception. "If you work in a large room, you will feel like you want to know what is going on in the background, so the backlight has to be set more brightly," says de Bakker.

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-smart-strategy-open-plan-offices-percent.html